Count Frames in an Animated GIF

By  on  

The animated GIF always makes me chuckle; on one hand they seem like a relic of the "old web", on the other hand they aren't going anywhere and their meme-like presence seem to only make them more popular.  If you browse through my media blog posts archives, you'll notice that I've written a ton about animated GIFs, including how to tell if a gif is animated, how to get a screenshot of the first frame, converting GIF to WEBP, and more.

My curiosity recently brought me to asking how to detect how many frames were present in an animated GIF; as expected, ImageMagick had the answer:

identify -format "%n\n" bitcoin.gif | head -n 1
>> 101

What is this calculation useful for?  I suppose if you have a media management site you could show each frame to a user so they could choose a poster when converting to video.  In any event, I was curious and simply had to find out!

Recent Features

  • By
    JavaScript Promise API

    While synchronous code is easier to follow and debug, async is generally better for performance and flexibility. Why "hold up the show" when you can trigger numerous requests at once and then handle them when each is ready?  Promises are becoming a big part of the JavaScript world...

  • By
    Responsive Images: The Ultimate Guide

    Chances are that any Web designers using our Ghostlab browser testing app, which allows seamless testing across all devices simultaneously, will have worked with responsive design in some shape or form. And as today's websites and devices become ever more varied, a plethora of responsive images...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Spatial Navigation

    Spatial navigation is the ability to navigate to focusable elements based on their position in a given space.  Spatial navigation is a must when your site or app must respond to arrow keys, a perfect example being a television with directional pad remote.  Firefox OS TV apps are simply...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools ScrollSide

    This post is a proof of concept post -- the functionality is yet to be perfected. Picture this: you've found yourself on a website that uses horizontal scrolling instead of vertical scrolling. It's an artistic site so you accept that the site scrolls left to right.

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!